22
votes
Accepted
What's the background to the popularity of turquoise in Russian architecture?
It's entirely modern.
In 1840, the Winter Palace wasn't teal. This page has a lovely timeline of how its color changed in the moist Baltic climate from beige to ochre, before being painted...bright ...
- 10.6k
15
votes
Accepted
Is there any painting in art history that depicts furniture floating in the air?
René Magritte's Le Temps menaçant (Threatening Weather) depicts a marble torso, a tuba, and what I would call a "kitchen chair" (a wooden chair with wicker seat), all in greyish white, ...
- 1,773
14
votes
Are there examples of artwork which anachronistically showed ancients equipped with firearms?
In history "ancient" usually refers to the time period of Antiquity, the time before the beginning of the Middle Ages roughly about AD 500.
I note that King Arthur was said to have been ...
- 19.3k
8
votes
Why are there no pandas in historical Chinese art?
It's not clear that there is really anything surprising about this. Before modern times, the panda was just one of many virtually unknown wild species. It was rarely mentioned in text either.
From the ...
- 20.8k
8
votes
What is the earliest reference to playing chess with Death?
All the earlier examples I can find seem to come to us by way of Murray's classic A History of Chess (1913). Assuming you don't want to split hairs between the figures of Death and the Devil, then I ...
- 20.8k
6
votes
Accepted
What is the earliest reference to playing chess with Death?
Not a precursor, but a painting of the same subject dating to 1480 is described in the detailed guidebook to Strasbourg Cathedral by the Strasbourgian writer Oseas Schadaeus (1586-1626): Oseas ...
- 2,526
6
votes
Accepted
Is there a word for this aesthetic from the late 80s and early 90s?
That film look is heavily employed in a film genre called neo-noir. The movie Seven is in fact one exemplar of it. Film of course is a story-telling medium, but it is also a visual medium. One of the ...
- 119k
6
votes
Is there any painting in art history that depicts furniture floating in the air?
If we're accepting non-painting artworks, there's always Phillipe Halsman's famous photo of Salvadore Dali Dali Atomicus
- 161
5
votes
Are there realistic Ancient Egyptian artistic renderings of *flames*?
Here is a representation of the cooking of tiger nut cakes for the sun god Amun from the tomb of Rekhmire, an Egyptian vizier, painted in the 18th Dynasty, around 1400 BCE . You can see the flames ...
- 51
5
votes
What is the earliest reference to playing chess with Death?
My answer would be basically the same as Brian Z, but since I spent the last hours getting the original of what he quoted and preparing a at least readable translation (with the help of Google ...
- 5,239
4
votes
Is there any painting in art history that depicts furniture floating in the air?
There is the The Absinthe Drinker by Degas, where the tables are somewhat missing support. For me it always represented the state of mind of the drinker, somehow at that stage you don't really care ...
- 141
3
votes
Accepted
Which artist had a special exhibition in the Kunstmuseum Bonn in summer 2012?
I searched "Kunstsmuseum Bonn 2012"; the museum publicity for that year is online, listing the artists and showing some thumbnails - that might help you to recall. Could it have been D. Reed
MCW♦
- 33.7k
2
votes
Accepted
Is there a dog in Rembrandt's "The Night Watch"?
It's a dog. Not only a good scan like that in https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-C-5 shows it is a dog, but sources like https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/curators-discover-hidden-...
- 3,871
2
votes
Is there any painting in art history that depicts furniture floating in the air?
I'm not sure what you mean by "in art history".
There's a large mural in Boise, Idaho, US of a floating chair.
"In 2017, Spokane’s David Carmack Lewis painted the first of three murals ...
- 159
2
votes
Accepted
Who was the model for Trutat's famous painting Nude Girl on a Panther Skin?
I have found a source which details the names of the family members of Nicholas Tussa. There are a couple of options, but I believe the information may indicate that your mystery model's name may have ...
- 39.7k
1
vote
What is the original source of this 16th century image of a French town holiday with musicians in a tree?
According to this source, it is an oil painting titled "Fête populaire autour d'un arbre" from 1560 (Popular celebration around a tree) being shown at the Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris....
- 11
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible